ZA/UM announces layoffs two months after the launch of Zero Parades

ZA/UM announces layoffs two months after the launch of Zero Parades

Up to 32 employees were affected by the studio's recent decision.

Layoffs in the video game industry just keep coming. In a post on social media, ZA/UM Studio, the developer and publisher of Disco Elysium and more recently Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, announced that it "served redundancy or at-risk notices impacting up to 32 of our colleagues across all departments at ZA/UM Studio."

The news of the layoffs comes only a few months after the studio's latest game was released in May.

ZA/UM Studio attributed the layoffs to the weak "commercial performance" of Zero Parades: For Dead Spies, which "has not enabled us to sustain a studio of our current size." According to SteamDB, the espionage RPG hit an all-time peak of 3,177 players around the time of its release, but has steadily declined since.

Background and industry context

For diehard Disco Elysium fans, the news of layoffs may not come as a total surprise. After the success of the narrative-heavy RPG in 2019, ZA/UM Studio went through a series of conflicts including:

• The firing of the game's core team
• A lawsuit involving intellectual property theft
• Accusations of a hostile work environment for women

Former devs with ZA/UM Studio subsequently made their own studio called Longdue, which is also working on a "narrative-first" game.

As for the latest layoffs, ZA/UM Studio said it's still "continued to consult and work with representatives of the ZA/UM Workers' Alliance."